It might further be pointed out in another direction that he takes for granted that the mode of advance into a social state has always been one and the same, a single and uniform process, marked by precisely the same set of several stages, following one another in precisely the same order.  There is no evidence of this; on the contrary, evidence goes to show that civilisation varies in origin and process with race and other things, and that though in all cases starting from the prime factor of sociableness in man, yet the course of its development has depended on the particular sets of circumstances with which that factor has had to combine.  These are full of variety, according to climate and racial predisposition, although, as has been justly said, the force of both these two elements diminishes as the influence of the past in giving consistency to our will becomes more definite, and our means of modifying climate and race become better known.  There is no sign that Rousseau, any more than many other inquirers, ever reflected whether the capacity for advance into the state of civil society in any highly developed form is universal throughout the species, or whether there are not races eternally incapable of advance beyond the savage state.  Progress would hardly be the exception which we know it to be in the history of communities if there were not fundamental diversities in the civilisable quality of races.  Why do some bodies of men get on to the high roads of civilisation, while others remain in the jungle and thicket of savagery; and why do some races advance along one of these roads, and others advance by different roads?

Considerations of this sort disclose the pinched frame of trim theory with which Rousseau advanced to set in order a huge mass of boundlessly varied, intricate, and unmanageable facts.  It is not, however, at all worth while to extend such criticism further than suffices to show how little his piece can stand the sort of questions which may be put to it from a scientific point of view.  Nothing that Rousseau had to say about the state of nature was seriously meant for scientific exposition, any more than the Sermon on the Mount was meant for political economy.  The importance of the Discourse on Inequality lay in its vehement denunciation of the existing social state.  To the writer the question of the origin of inequality is evidently far less a matter at heart, than the question of its results.  It is the natural inclination of one deeply moved by a spectacle of depravation in his own time and country, to extol some other time or country, of which he is happily ignorant enough not to know the drawbacks.  Rousseau wrote about the savage state in something of the same spirit in which Tacitus wrote the Germania.  And here, as in the Discourse on the influence of science and art upon virtue, there is a positive side.  To miss this in resentment of the unscientific paradox that lies about it, is to miss the force of the piece,